"Hello, my name is Ted Vestorius and I had a 35 plus year career working in infectious diseases with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I was fortunate to deploy around the world numerous times and in the spring of 2010 I volunteered for an IDA assignment with the World Health Organization in support of polio eradication and I was assigned to Ghana, a country in West Africa. Now while there I participated in two national immunization days, each of which lasts three days and the purpose is to vaccinate all children in the country aged five and under with two drops of oral polio vaccine. So now as a parent I know that there's nothing in this world that we love more than our children and that we'll do everything we can within our capacity to protect them. These parents share that value. They also had first hand knowledge of how polio can harm an unvaccinated child. Therefore they were determined to do whatever they could to protect their children. Their efforts validated my commitment to volunteer and be part of WHO's vaccination team. To me the algorithm is simple, vaccine preventable diseases are bad, vaccines are good. There are decades of scientific study and analysis that have proven that vaccines are safe and effective and that their results are healthy adults. It's a proven fact. Vaccines save lives. Now every parent I met in Ghana understood the benefits of childhood vaccines and they did their part to protect their children and the children of their communities and it was a privilege to play a small role in helping them raise healthy children. Now the vast majority of parents here in the U.S. had never seen a child type or struggle from the severe effects of polio but that doesn't hold true in many foreign countries. There they can see the crippling impacts of polio and other vaccine preventable diseases on a near daily basis, as could I when I was there. So the opportunity to protect their children was an easy one and they left it."